That's like being okay with a candidate Googling the answer during an interview. Not unheard of, but unusual. It seems hard to test someone's knowledge that way.
At my company we tell people that they should feel free to google or consult references at practical coding challenges.
> It seems hard to test someone's knowledge that way.
I don’t really want to test knowledge but skill. Can you do the thing? At work you will have access to these references so why not during the interview?
Now that doesn’t mean that we are not taking note when you go searching and what you go searching for.
If you told us that you spent the last 8 years of your life working with python and you totally blank on the syntax of how to write a class that is suspicious. If you don’t remember the argument order of some obscure method? Who cares. If you worked in so many languages that you don’t remember if the Lock class in this particular one is reentrant or not and have to look it up? You might even get “bonus points” for saying something like that because it demonstrates a broad interest and attention to detail. (Assuming that using a Lock is reasonable in the situation and so on of course :))
I do want to understand their knowledge. I'll preface questions with the disclaimer that I am not looking for the book definition of a concept, but to understand if the candidate understands the topic and to what depth. I'll often tell them that if they dont know, just say so. I'll start with a simple question and keep digging deeper until either they bottom out or I do.
I'm okay with them googling too. And I tell them that at the start. But if they take ages to lookup the answer when others just know the answer, it's gonna hurt their chances.
Sure, they can search it live but you have to assess if they understand what they found. Usually, if they really know their stuff, whatever they find is just gently pushing their working memory to connect the dots and give a decent answer. Otherwise it's pretty easy to ask a follow up question and see a candidate struggle.
It's like in college when you're allowed to take textbooks to an exam. You can bet the professor spent more time crafting questions that you can't answer blindly.
That being said, I think both types of questions have their place in an interview process. You can start with the no searching allowed questions in the beginning to assess real basic knowledge and, once you determine the candidate has some knowledge, you start probing more to see if they can connect the dots, maybe it's architecture decisions and their consequences, maybe it's an unexpected requirement and how they would react, etc.
The knowledge we're testing is related to how well you can do your job. Work isn't closed book - if you can quickly formulate a good query to grab any missing information off the internet then more power to you. I've worked with extremely stubborn people who were very smart and would spend a week trying to sort out a problem before googling it, there are some limited situations (highly experimental work) where this is valuable but... I no longer work with these people.
